Never heard of it? It's huge overseas and in the states, but it's a niche activity to be sure, but don't let your lack of awareness prevent you from enjoying the the most versatile and funkiest dance style on planet earth...

Popping is fresh, It's also good for learning how to breath and isolate your muscle groups, and if a song is playing and you feel like popping then get ill son. To me nothing feels better than losing yourself in the funk, Life is all about moments in time yo....

Yeah, used to break dance in High School back in the late 90s. It's cool, but it's still a bit of a sub-culture. I know it's more popular in Asia, and pretty much the entire B-Boi (and B-Gurl) crew we had was Asian. Our best breaker was a Vietnamese guy. We had 2 female breakers as well, they were actually pretty good, although they didn't really do much floor routines. It's actually pretty hard to break dance and even the simplest routines take a great deal of effort and discipline to get right. It took me almost 2 months to do the 6 step smoothly, 3 months to finally chain 2 windmills and I could never quite get the flare right. The hand glide and kicks were a bit easier, everyone starts with the k kick, once you get that, you can easily pull off a Nike and J kick. Gotta know the k kick before you can consider doing a 1990. The hardest, but also the most underrated moves are the aerials. Most people don't take much notice of the aerials, you usually get the ooh and aahs from the floor routines, since it's easier to see them and they look cool. I know a lot of people wanted to learn how to break, but after 1 or 2 sessions would quit since it requires 1) lots of upper body strength 2) good sense of balance and body position 3) flexibility and 4) sense of rhythm. If you can't do at least 50 push ups, hold a core stabilizer for more than 2 minutes, do a head stand or touch your toes without bending your knees, you may need to work on getting your body in shape before you try anything, or you'll just end up hurting yourself.

There's something unnerving about putting the words break and dancing into a single activity. Who thought that was a good idea? What's next? Hairline Fracture Figure Skating?

Oh, and for those of you who are wondering why it's called break dancing, contrary to popular belief, it's not because you end up breaking something while dancing, it's because you dance to break beats, which is common in funk, hip hop and latin music. The dance style was popularized in the 70s, and has a lot of influence from Capoeira. In fact, you can argue that break dancing is a more modernized, less violent form of capoeira.

I used to be a hip hop teacher, but I've never been able to bboy (too tall). Just last week I got to meet Suga Pop of the Electric Boogaloos, one of the groups that helped invent the dance style of popping.